In 1965, Glenn Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) is a professional musician and composer who has been relatively successful in the exhausting life of a musician. However, in an attempt to enjoy more free time with his young wife, Iris (Glenne Headly), and to enable him to compose a piece of orchestral music, the 30-year-old Holland accepts a high school teaching position.
The film follows the adventures of a group of friends through the eyes of Charles (Hugh Grant), a good-natured but socially awkward Briton, who is smitten with Carrie (Andie MacDowell), an American whom Charles repeatedly meets at four weddings and at a funeral.
When Cole's Department Store's Santa Claus gets drunk before taking part in the Thanksgiving parade, Dorey Walker (Elizabeth Perkins), Cole's director of special events, fires him and must find a replacement immediately. She spots an old man (Richard Attenborough) berating the inebriated Santa, and begs him to take over. He introduces himself as Kris Kringle. Kris does so well during the parade that he is immediately hired to be Cole's main Santa for the holiday period. All the children in New York begin to believe that he is the real Santa, with the exception of Dorey's six-year-old daughter Susan (Mara Wilson). Dorey's boyfriend, Bryan Bedford (Dylan McDermott), does his best to convince Susan to believe. While being babysat one night by Kris, Susan shares with him her Christmas wish, she would like a dad, a house (used every year for the Cole's catalogue photoshoot) and a baby brother. Kris asks if she would begin to believe in Santa if she got all those things. Susan agrees that she would.
A Boston couple, Gail (Meryl Streep) and Tom (David Strathairn), are having marital problems, due to his inability to spend time with his family because of his work as an architect. She, a water rafting expert, decides to take their son, Roarke (Joseph Mazzello), on a holiday rafting trip down the Salmon River in Idaho, along with their dog, Maggie. Their daughter, Willa (Stephanie Sawyer), accompanies them to Gail's parents' house in Idaho. At the last minute, just when they are about to leave for the almost week-long trip, Tom joins them. As they are setting off, they meet a couple of other rafters, Wade (Kevin Bacon) and Terry (John C. Reilly), who appear to be friendly. Thus they leave for the trip, leaving Willa behind to be taken care of by her grandparents.
A mute Scotswoman named Ada McGrath is sold by her father into marriage to a New Zealand frontiersman named Alisdair Stewart, bringing her young daughter Flora with her. The voice that the audience hears in the opening narration is "not her speaking voice, but her mind's voice". Ada has not spoken a word since she was six years old and no one, including herself, knows why. She expresses herself through her piano playing and through sign language, for which her daughter has served as the interpreter. Flora later dramatically tells two women in New Zealand that her mother has not spoken since the death of her husband who died as a result of being struck by lightning. Ada cares little for the mundane world, occupying herself for hours every day with the piano. Flora, it is later learned, is the product of a relationship with a teacher with whom Ada believed she could communicate through her mind, but who "became frightened and stopped listening," and thus left her.
This film focuses on the interrelationships between Deaf culture and language in France. Its overview encompasses a broad range of perspectives, contrasting the stories of a family who has been deaf and thriving for five generations with the story of a woman whose deafness was misunderstood, causing her to be confined for a time in an asylum for the insane. The documentary features hearing-impaired people of all ages and from all walks of life. With their profound deafness in common, the children and adults featured in this film communicate their dreams and thoughts through sign language. In one segment, Philibert focuses his camera on group of schoolchildren who are learning how to communicate in a world where they must read lips and speak words. The personal lives of some of the pupils and various adults are explored, including an actor, a sign-language teacher, and an engaged couple.
Rebeca, a TV news broadcaster, is at Madrid's airport anxiously awaiting the return of her mother whom she has not seen since she was a child. Her mother, Becky del Páramo, a famous torch song singer, is coming back to Spain after a fifteen-year stay in Mexico. While waiting, Rebeca recalls incidents from her childhood in which her mother let her in the background of her life preoccupied with her career and her romantic life. For fifteen years Rebeca has longed for her mother to come back and for the love and affection of which she had been deprived. Nevertheless, her love is accompanied by a deep resentment.
The film begins with graduate student Teri MacDonald (Helen Hunt) and her work training a chimpanzee named Virgil to use American Sign Language. When her research grant is not renewed, Virgil is taken away. Teri is told that Virgil will be sent to a zoo. Instead, he is taken to an Air Force base to be used in a top-secret research project involving platforms designed to simulate the operation of aircraft.
Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin) is a troubled young deaf woman working as a cleaner at a school for the deaf and hard of hearing in New England. An energetic new teacher, James Leeds (William Hurt), arrives at the school and encourages her to set aside her insular life by learning how to speak aloud.
The film introduces us to Koko soon after she was brought from the San Francisco Zoo to Stanford University by Dr. Penny Patterson for a controversial experiment—she would be taught the basics of human communication through American Sign Language.
The overarching plot takes place over five days leading up to a political rally for Replacement Party candidate Hal Phillip Walker, who is never seen throughout the entire movie. The story follows 24 characters roaming around Nashville, in search of some sort of goal through their own (often overlapping) story arcs.
Steve Adams (Peter Wolf), a theology student, begins to suspect he may be a vampire after a series of blood-draining murders in his town. After his preacher father has a heart attack, Steve is told the mysterious circumstances surrounding his mother's death and finds out that she was seduced by Dracula while she was pregnant with him. Steve sets out to find Dracula's coffin to release himself from this curse, while two detectives attempt to catch this serial murderer.
When an old man (Sebastian Cabot) spies the department store Santa Claus get drunk before taking part in the Macy's Thanksgiving parade, he immediately locates and complains to Karen Walker (Jane Alexander), the parade director. She promptly fires her Santa Claus and the old man, who turns out to be named Kris Kringle, volunteers to take his place for the sake of the children. Kris does so well during the parade that he is immediately hired to be the store's main Santa for the holiday period. At the same time, Karen's daughter, Susan (Suzanne Davidson), an intelligent but cynical six-year-old, meets her new neighbor, Bill Schafner (David Hartman), a lawyer, and decides to try and hook him up with her mother.
The movie is a lesson on how to live life, taking up the lives of Hari (Sanjeev Kumar) and Aarthi (Jaya Bhaduri) who are deaf and mute. They meet, fall in love, get married, have a child who they bring up to be well educated and who gets married to a girl similar to his parents. All they have to help them is their hope, confidence and some kindness in the society along with Uncle Narayan who is blind. Tragedy strikes their lives as well when they lose their first child thanks to Kanu's greed. But they never give up hope on life and not in one instance during the entire movie do they think about ending it. They live life, fight it and succeed in it at a bigger scale than any normal person.